The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (3 page)

When we talk of ‘Dark Ages’
we emphasize war, invasion, raids and conquests, even genocide; but we have all that
at home, in our own time, and we still live our lives. Until quite recently it was
possible to write of ‘mass exterminations’ when the Anglo-Saxons crossed
the North Sea to take power over Britons and Britain, a wiping away of one people by
another, even though the evidence suggests a far longer, gentler and more friendly
process.
¹³
We were in danger of forgetting what really happened around
the sea, in its zone of trade and faith, which stretched at least from Dublin to
Gdansk, from Bergen to Dover. Around the Mediterranean we take for granted links and
influences, back and forth: the biblical stories, the epic voyages in Homer and
Hesiod, the trade routes from east to west and back again. The North Sea had most of
those things, and the consequences were remarkable.

I mean to tell that story as best I can
find it in the sources and in the work of scholars round the sea. This is not a
chauvinist exercise; the South is no less important because we remember what
happened in the North. This is an attempt to paint a fuller, more colourful and more
precise picture of where we come from.

The seaside mob never went very far
beyond the comforts of the shore. We’re going out further, even if it means
going out of our depth.

There was a time when nobody could
imagine going further: the northern sea was the very edge of the world. In 16
CE
the Roman Drusus Germanicus tried to take his fleet north and
was beaten back by storms; the poet Albinovanus Pedo was with him and wrote that
the gods were calling them back to stop
them seeing the very end of everything. Pedo wondered why their ships were violating
these foreign seas and stirring up the quiet homes of the gods. For the northern sea
was not just, as the Arab geographer Al Idrisi wrote, ‘the sea of perpetual
gloom’,
¹⁴
it was the place where the
oceans clashed, where the tides were made as the waters rushed in and out of
bottomless caves and the waters fell away into ‘primordial and first matter,
that was in the beginning of the world … called the
“abyss”’.
¹⁵

The seventh-century Isidore of Seville
thought the known earth ‘was called
orbis
because it was like a wheel
with the ocean flowing all around it’. This ocean had to be much smaller than
the dry land, because the apocryphal Book of Esdras told God so: ‘on the third
day, You ordered the waters to collect in a seventh part of the earth; the other six
parts You made dry land.’ But it was also a formidable obstacle, a barricade
around the continents; perhaps too wild, but more likely too shallow, too muddy, too
full of weeds to be crossed. It might just be possible to pass through the hot and
torrid zones to the south, but the frozen north was the very end of the world.
¹⁶

The barrier was not just physical. The
sea was a place of evil, where lived the biblical Leviathan, monster of the deep.
The Antichrist, the ‘man of pride’, rode backwards on the head of a sea
dragon just as the Vikings rode on ships with snakes’ heads for prows.
¹⁷
Genesis and the Book of Job confirmed what the geographers agreed: that the sea was
unruly, that the dragon who lived there was the dragon of chaos, that the abyss lay
in wait. When the Book of Revelations promised that the sea would be no more, it was
understood to mean the end of evil itself.
¹⁸

This was a sea that was hardly known,
waiting to be explored: a zone between Heaven and Earth, between the familiar
coastline and whatever lay out in the waters. The Irish told extraordinary holy
tales about sea voyages, called
immrama
,
¹⁹
which means
‘rowing about’; they told how hermits took to the sea because they
wanted to settle somewhere far away and entirely peaceful. Saints sailed off to find
the promised land to the west, the islands of the blessed.

These are fables full of wonders, but
also very practical advice. In the eighth-century
Voyage of St Brendan
, a
holy saga about going to
Heaven and the
gates of Hell, there are also instructions on how to make a boat for such a voyage,
a coracle built of oxhide and oak bark on a wooden frame and then greased with
animal fat. We are told that the saint and his fellow voyagers took along spare
skins and extra fat.
²⁰
The sea was there to be used,
even if it took a saint to make the attempt, and although some of the marvels are
doubtful – like being stranded for months each year on the back of a highly
complaisant whale – some of the ones that seem most fanciful are teasingly
likely.

The sailors see a high mountain rising
out of the sea behind sheer black cliffs, its peak hidden in what looks like cloud
but turns out to be smoke. The mountain vomits flames sky-high and then seems to
suck them back. The rocks, right down to the sea, glow red like fire. Here Brendan
and his crew find Judas Iscariot crouching on a bare rock, waves crashing over his
head, which he says is a grateful respite; at night he goes back to the mountain,
the home of the great Leviathan, where demons torture him for his sin and he burns
‘like a lump of molten lead in a crucible, day and night’.
²¹

The sinners and demons, the notion that
the mountain welcomes damned souls with a joyful blast of flames, do not make a
historical record, although they make a very powerful lesson for the faithful. But
we’re told that when Brendan turns away from the mountain island he is heading
south; that implies the island must lie far to the north. Far north of Ireland,
where the
Voyage
was written, is volcanic Iceland, and seas where small
islands do indeed suddenly come smoking up out of the water along one of the major
fault lines of the Earth. Brendan’s voyage is a voyage to known places after
all.

The monk Dicuil wrote about all the
islands to the north of Ireland: ‘Among these, I have lived in some, and have
visited others; some I have only glimpsed while others I have read about.’
²²
Most likely he never got further than the Hebrides or maybe the Orkneys, but others
went much further: as far as Thule, the half-mythical island to the very north of
everything. Dicuil quotes classical writers who knew about an island which in summer
‘shines both by day and by night under the rays of the sun’ and in
winter has no day at all. He also writes that ‘clerics, who had lived on the
island from the first of February to the first of August, told me that [around the
days of the
summer solstice] the setting
sun hides itself as though behind a small hill in such a way that there was no
darkness in that very small space of time’. He says a man had enough light to
pick the lice out of his shirt at night.

This Thule sounds very much like
Iceland.

More, the early-twelfth-century
Book
of the Icelanders
says that when the Norsemen first began to settle Iceland
around 870, they found priests already living there, but the priests refused to live
with heathens and they went away, leaving ‘Irish books and bells and croziers
from which one could know that they were Irishmen’.
²³
So for all
Dicuil’s other stories of men born with horse’s feet, others with ears
large enough to cover their whole bodies, and elks whose upper lip hangs down so
much they can eat only if they walk backwards, not to mention the difficulty of
trapping unicorns because they make so much noise, there is fact here: the fact of
constant, eager movement on the sea.

The sea was not yet criss-crossed with
long established trade routes and war routes like the Mediterranean; in the North,
the sea was still full of legend, so when men went sailing they knew they were
testing the edge of the world. Around 1075 the bishop Adam of Bremen wrote his
dubious history of the previous archbishops of the northern German town of Bremen.
He was writing from a seaport where he could listen to what sailors thought they
knew about the sea. He reckoned the way north went through the seas around Orkney,
water so thick with salt a ship needed strong winds to pass, and led on to Iceland
with its black ice so old it would burn. ‘Beyond Norway, which is the
farthermost northern country, you will find no human habitation, nothing but ocean,
terrible to look upon and limitless, encircling the whole world.’ Black mist
would come down here, the seas would go wild, and you would come to the point where
all the tides of the sea are sucked into the deeps and then vomited back. If you
still kept sailing, sailing, as King Harald Hardrada did, you would come to the
‘darksome bounds of a failing world’; ‘by retracing his step he
barely escaped in safety the vast pit of the abyss’.
²⁴

Men wanted to cross that abyss, to find
what lay beyond. Some time around the turn of the thirteenth century, the anonymous
author of the
History of
Norway
thought he knew all about the dangers and the wonders of the north.
He knew there were whirlpools and frozen headlands which send huge icebergs headlong
into the sea; and sea monsters that swallow down sailors, horse-whales with
spreading manes and giants without head or tail.
²⁵
He says that in
living memory the sea came to boil and the earth gave out fire and a great mountain
came up out of the waters; but he is a sophisticated man, and he doubts that this is
any kind of evil omen. He says only that God understands it; and we don’t.

What interests him now is not the terror
of the sea, but what you find when you get across it. Adam of Bremen filled the
north with men who never walked, only hopped on one foot, and those who ate human
flesh (‘as they are shunned, so may they also rightfully be passed over in
silence’). There were Goths and blue men, worshippers of dragons and Prussians
who seemed ‘a most humane people’. There were dogheaded men and men with
one eye in the middle of their foreheads; and when the Amazons gave birth, which
they did after seducing passing merchants, or forcing their male captives, or
perhaps just by sipping water, the boys that resulted had their heads on their
chests and the girls became beautiful women who drove away any man who even came
close. The edge of the world was also the edge of reason.
²⁶

Between the time the story of Brendan
was first composed and the writing of the
History of Norway
many ships had
been sailing out north and out west, carrying people and cargoes and using the sea
that once had been a source of pure, holy terror. The change is profound, but not at
all complete: there was still a great unknown beyond the ice in the north, a place
to be filled up with stories. Yet the mystics of Germany and the Netherlands, who
once used the sea as a symbol of hostile, purifying space, now start to use the
desert as their metaphor instead. The sea is too busy, too practical; the desert is
still pure and utterly strange. The sea was beginning to be known. When the mystic
Hadewijch writes about water in the thirteenth century, she does not see it as the
terrifying prospect it once was; the abyss is no longer a threat to life or the end
of the world, for her it is a way to think about the tempestuous nature of God
himself
and the way you can be lost in
love. Leviathan has, for the moment, gone away.
²⁷

There were other monsters still present
and they travelled. Polar bears and their pelts hardly ever turn up in customs
records, but the ferocious live beasts were brought to Norway as bribes, and
successful ones: they even turn up, but not often, at the French and English
courts.
²⁸
The edgy North had become like Africa and Asia: a distant
place, a strange place, but a source of wonders that could be known, traded and
used.

Take the medieval tale of Audun: a man
with almost nothing, who had to work and live with relatives in the Westfjords of
Iceland and had a mother dependent on him. He did have luck, though, and it got him
a bear. In Iceland almost everything was sold on credit, because people had to be
able to eat in spring even if the wool and the cloth that they traded for food would
not be ready until summer. They depended for supplies on sea captains from Norway,
who had a pressing interest in knowing who was truly creditworthy. Audun helped one
captain so well that he was offered passage to Greenland. He sold off his sheep to
support his mother, because by law he had to provide her with enough to take her
through six seasons – three winters, three summers – and he sailed out.
²⁹

On Greenland he met a hunter with a
polar bear that was ‘exceptionally beautiful with red cheeks’. He
offered the man all the money he had to buy the bear; the man told him that
wasn’t wise, and Audun said he didn’t care. He wanted to make his mark
on the world by giving the bear away to a king: a gift as exotic, as rare, as any
rhinoceros given to a Pope in later centuries.

Shipping a polar bear for days out at
sea in a small boat is wild, but not implausible. A bishop on his way from Iceland
to the mainland to be consecrated took with him ‘a white bear from Greenland
and the animal was the greatest of treasures’; the beast ended up in the
Emperor’s menagerie. When Greenlanders wanted a bishop of their own in 1125
they sent a bear to the King of Norway to encourage him, and the ploy worked.
³⁰
Bears went much further, in fact. King Håkon of Norway sealed his deal with King
Henry III of England
with gifts of
falcons, furs, whale tusks, a live elk and a live polar bear.
³¹
The monsters of
the North start to seem almost domestic; the law in Iceland, where any polar bear at
all was a rare sight on the floating ice, laid down that ‘if a man has a tame
white bear then he is to handle it in the same way as a dog’.